The Editorial Notebook; New York's Old, and Fat, Constitution

By John P. MacKenzie

Published: April 20, 1987

Instead of celebrating this 200th year of the United States Constitution, scholars and legal experts are ''cerebrating.'' Meanwhile, the New York State Constitution, which is older and longer - at times unfathomably longer - doesn't even warrant a public seminar on its 210th birthday, which happens to be today. Yet it, too, is a document that is worth pondering.

Many of the U.S. Constitution's grand generalities -about free speech, due process of law, equal protection of the laws - also grace New York's. The state Bill of Rights, not added until 1846, speaks even more spaciously about religious liberty: ''The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all mankind. . . .''

But those great phrases all but drown in fine print. Hundreds of pages concern things like railroad grade crossings, workmen's compensation and ski trails. Micro-management of the gambling industry, two pages' worth, follows the right of peaceable assembly.

Judge Judith Kaye of the Court of Appeals wondered in a recent lecture why New York's Constitution reads ''like a volume of miscellaneous statutes,'' its article on local finances alone longer than the entire United States Constitution. New Yorkers, she suggested, saw fit to nail down certain distinctive values and immunize them from tampering by legislature and governor.

Certainly distrust springs from between the state charter's lines. Conservationists won amendments declaring that the forest preserve shall be ''forever kept wild,'' but then went on to outline the boundaries of wild areas with the precise language of a deed and spelled out other minutiae like the width of permissible ski trails.

Promoters of the amendments, in other words, didn't trust governors, legislatures or courts to construe what wildness meant as developers encroached. The state Bill of Rights demands that the power of grand juries to investigate and prosecute willful misconduct by public officers ''shall never be suspended or impaired by law,'' a flourish that might seem superfluous. But is it really, when the ''ethics bill'' just vetoed by Governor Cuomo would have put some financial disclosure filings beyond the reach of a grand jury subpoena?

''We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding,'' said the great U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall in 1819, expressing the kind of respect for the public trust that is essential to the stewardship of so lean a document as the U.S. Constitution. Not that the Federal document lacks checks and balances, but the bloat in New York's suggests historic deficits of respect and trust. That is the point to consider on its anniversary day.